High Housing Price - Does it hurt the PAP Government?

The answer to the question in the title seems pretty obvious, doesn't it.

Well, I would like to argument that the sum tangible outcome of the public sentiments towards high housing price may not hurt the PAP government as much as what many would like to think. Why is this so?

Firstly, there is this thing called entrenched interest. And there is this other thing called self-interest. There are a substantial portion of citizens out there who are living in landed properties,private apartments and high-end HDB flats who have cleared or almost cleared their outstanding mortgages. For most mortals, they will invariably experience a saccharine feeling when they get hit by the daily bombardment of advertisements in the paper or otherwise telling them that their properties are now worth much more than the original purchase value. Most will even secretly hope it will go higher as then they will feel even richer, though much of that is not realisable unless the property is sold. Remember, these people do not have a mortgage or very little mortgage left to service. It is like buying at stock and seeing its price shooting into the atmospheric region over a matter of a few years or months.

High property prices hit hardest on those salaried workers who are about to settle down in their lives and are thinking about how to purchase their first property.

To sum up, high property prices, in itself will not cause the PAP government to lose an election and I believe the incumbent goverment knows that pretty well. Through the concept of home ownership and rising property prices, the government has actually built safety "ballasts" into our election system to determine an outcome favourable to the incumbent. So, it is of paramount importance that the opposition cannot be seen in the eyes of the public as trouble-makers bent on overturning the system, advertently or not.